Development testing service Coverity’s annual scan report, which is based on data from almost 500 software projects with a total of over 450 million lines of code, says that almost 230,000 defects were found and fixed. And while the average defect density per thousand lines of code was almost identical between open source and proprietary, there was an interesting diversion in the results.

Open source projects, Coverity says, tend to have .69 bugs per thousand lines of code, virtually the same as proprietary software, which tends to have .68 errors per thousand lines. But large closed-source projects — over one million lines of code — tend to have 33 percent fewer errors than small closed-source projects, with .66 errors over each thousand lines of larger projects compared to .98 in smaller projects. And small open source projects have a massive 70 percent fewer errors than large open source software, with only .44 defects compared to .75.

The difference, according to Coverity, is that small open source projects are labors of love by individual developers or small teams, who carefully comb through their code to reduce errors. Large open source projects, on the other hand, tend to lack standardized processes to ensure code quality, and so the error rate increases.

In commercial or closed-source software, developers experience almost the opposite conditions. Large projects tend to have well-defined formal testing processes, which ensure higher code quality, and small projects tend to be hasty, quick endeavors that show the effects of growing pains, as no standardized testing is in place.

In other words, if you’re looking for bug-free apps, look for a small open source project or a large proprietary piece of software, because those have the best chance of having few defects and high overall code quality.

All of the data in infographic form:

photo credit: gui.tavares via photopin cc

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Even if you’re a master coder, a good visual interface can make a world of difference when doing things like building responsive web apps.

That said, startup Divshot just raised $1.1 million in seed funding to grow its drag-and-drop visual builder. The startup’s service is described as a tool for professional web development that fuses a solid visual interface with professional code quality standards — or sort of like a Creative Suite for web developers. Divshot said it already has 40,000 users.

The seed round was led by Rincon Venture Partners with participation from 500 Startups, Daher Capital, Floodlight Ventures, Cooley LLP, Drummond Road Capital, and Eric Hammond.

“Super-smart team with kick-ass open-source cred building tools for developers? We can’t wait to see what they do next,” said 500 Startups’ Dave McClure in a statement.

Founded in April, the Los Angeles-based startup was previously a graduate of the Launchpad LA accelerator.

Money photo via Shutterstock

These days, most companies are releasing software multiple times a week. In fact, according to Zend CMO Elaine Lennox, for “born-on-the-web” companies, this release cycle is several times a day. In that speedy environment, you don’t want to spend a lot of time bugfixing.

In, fact, you can’t afford to.

One of the most common source of problems is coordination between those who build and those who provision: development and operations. Different operating environments, lack of automation, and complex deployment procedures cause challenges between the two groups: 56 percent of teams have built apps that work just find in testing environments, but fail in production environments.

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012

So Zend will be releasing a new version of its Zend Server and Zend Studio next week that, it says, will bridge the gap between development and operations. I chatted to Andi Gutmans, CEO and one of the original authors of the almost-ubiquitous PHP language, and Lennox yesterday.

“There’s a lot of pressure in companies to deliver mobile, cloud-enabled apps,” Gutmans says. “Half of teams are telling us that that they’ve missed dates because they cannot work together.”

Not working together causes bugs, and compounds the issues when bugs actually arise. According to Zend, 70 percent of the time for “fixing bugs” is actually spent in just finding the problem. Only 30 percent of developers’ time is spent solving it.

The new Zend Server 6 is designed to eliminate that 70 percent.

“The differences between development and live environments only get worse over time,” Lennox told me. “The development side doesn’t have visibility into errors in production, so the first step to fixing problems is to recreate the development environment from 3 months ago. We’ve seen teams literally waste weeks simply trying to reproduce issues.”

When that happens, people get upset. In numbers Lennox cited, 75 percent of developers say that operations is a “roadblock.” And, since one bad turn deserves another, 72 percent of operations engineers say that development is “not supportive of their goals.”

The fix?

Gutmans isn’t revealing just now what Zend is doing to solve the issue, except that Zend Server 6 will provide ”the tools, processes and infrastructure to enable teams to streamline and simplify their collaboration.”

More on that next week.

photo credit: e_monk via photopin cc

A good software company doesn’t stay still for long. Products are constantly in motion, from minor updates to major revamps. Technologies advance.

However, just because you release a quicker, sleeker, better version of your application, don’t expect that your user base will automatically love the new design.

The fact is, people get used to doing things a certain way, and getting comfortable with any change takes time.

From a software development standpoint, this means that successfully launching a major design improvement or UX change involves more than just writing good code. You have to also manage the transition for your existing user base.

At Zendesk, we recently changed our whole application from an HTML browser-based application to a single-page JavaScript application. This shift enabled us to create an extensible platform with a real-time experience that’s more streamlined and agile.

Yet even with these improvements, we still needed to help transition our end users for a significant change in the user experience.

Here are four tips we learned to help other developers ease their end users through a similar UX transition.

1. Bring your customers into the process from the beginning

When customers use an application on a daily basis — in some cases, eight or more hours per day with some enterprise apps — they form a close connection. These types of users don’t like to be caught off guard by surprise changes.

If you have an active and vested user base, let your customers know your plans as early as possible, including the underlying motivations driving the change. Do what you can to make your users feel they are an important part of the process. In some cases, this may be soliciting feedback and input from the user community before you begin the project.

2. Have a long beta period

Instead of just rolling out your new UX version all at once, it’s wise to have an initial soft launch to a smaller group of users, followed by a long beta period. Soft launches allow you to manage the transition with a “friendly” set of users who are open to the changes, while a long beta period will let you to see how users responds to your new design, workflow, features, etc.

We started with a soft launch to a small subset of Zendesk customers. This was followed by a four-month beta period, which allowed us to see how customers responded to the new design and workflow.

The other key benefit of a long beta period is it keeps the design team close to end users and their needs; this can be particularly important to keeping designers grounded and focused on real end user needs during long development projects.

3. Provide a transition period
Once you’re ready to release your new version, the official launch should also be carried out in stages. You’ll have a smoother transition if you don’t force everyone to switch at once.

After the launch of the new Zendesk, we immediately provided the new version for all new accounts and trials. However, we let all existing customers stay with the original version for an extended period, enabling them to transition at their own pace. Added flexibility lets customers switch back and forth between the former and new version, until they decide to transition for good.

Don’t worry about have to maintain two separate software versions. Going forward, you can make new features and enhancements available only on the newer version. That will provide extra incentive for even the most diehard legacy users to transition to the latest and greatest.

4. “Sell” your existing customers on the changes

Your company’s marketing material and sales team might be focused on pitching new customers, but don’t forget to talk to your existing customer base.

Whenever you’re rolling out a big UX change, it’s critical that your existing users fully understand what they’re getting. After all, you didn’t invest in this major development project just for the sake of change. Therefore, make sure all your users understand why you did it, and most importantly, how it will make their lives better or job easier.

Final thoughts

Don’t be discouraged if some users are resistant to change. That’s a sign you have passionate users who are fully invested in your product. However, by following these steps, you can ease your customers’ shift away from the status quo and help them reap the benefits of your hard work.

This post was written by Alexander Aghassipour, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Zendesk.

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I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the product.

I’m explicitly saying “UX” (user experience) rather than “UI” (user interface) as each company had an excellent designer and the application looked great. But the UX broke down quickly, especially as you went from novice first time user to experienced user.

Now, it’s not that the apps sucks. In each case, the apps ranged from good to great. They had huge amount of functionality, did unique things that other apps didn’t do, and solved a clear set of problems in a compelling way. They were fast, pretty, used nice fonts, and had good screen layouts.

But each had a jumble of different ways of doing things. As you went from one set of activities to another, the approach quickly became inconsistent. I kept noticing that when I was doing a different set of things in the app, the user flow would change. Or when I switched modalities, I would have different ways to do things that were dependent on where in the app I was.

Sometimes I’d click on a label to take an action; other times I’d click on a text description of the action. In some places I cared a lot about the Tab key; in others it was the Enter key. In some screens data was automatically saved after I exited a field; in others I had to take an explicit action. In some situations all the actions I could take were exposed; in others I had to search a menu tree for them. Orientation of the iPhone mattered in some cases and didn’t in others. Sometimes the key set of data that I was working on was the focus on the screen; in others it was only part of the screen.

When I start feeling uncomfortable with UX, I start counting extra key and mouse actions. When I think I should be able to do something with one action and it takes three or more, there’s a problem. When I realize in one part of the app that I can do something with one action, but in the other it takes four, there’s a problem.

In each of the companies, there was an excellent VP of engineering. Each one had a strong design/UI person. Two of the three had founder/CTOs. And the CEOs in each are excellent. They are each obsessed about the product, but they are approaching it from an engineering perspective. What are the features the user needs? What is the feedback we are getting about what individuals want to do? Each of these things ends up being a story or a task — a feature — but there is no unifying UX philosophy.

In each case, when asked, no one in the company owned the UX. In one case, no one felt qualified. In one case, no one really knew what I meant and kept conflating UX with UI. And in one case it was a revelation that users were struggling with a chaotic and inconsistent UX.

I’m noticing this more and more in the different apps I use, especially early-stage applications. Some are crafted beautifully from a UI perspective, but once I start using them on a daily basis, I want to scream. Others have acceptable UIs and a layer of UX consistency that breaks down immediately when I become an advanced user. And others are radically different UX experiences across devices.

I’ve come to appreciate the importance of a single person in the company owning the UX with this person being the arbiter of discussion around how to implement the UX. There’s nothing wrong with lots of different perspectives, but a single mind has to own it, synthesize it, and dictate the philosophy. But first, they have to understand the difference between UI and UX, and — more importantly — the product-oriented execs who approach things from an engineering perspective need to understand this.

I’ve decided it times to up our game significantly on this. I’m curious about what resources you rely on, thing are amazing, and would give to an executive team that is struggling with this.

Brad Feld is a managing director at Foundry Group; this post originall appeared on his blog. Feld lives in Boulder, Colo. and invests in software and Internet companies around the United States. In his spare time, he runs marathons and reads a lot.

Image credit: Juriah Mosin/Shuterstock

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Once upon a time, a hacker built a product. Then he sold it to a company that treated it poorly. Now, another company bought it back and promises to treat it right.

The product, Forrst, is a small but fascinating community of designers and developers. Its members post bits of UI and code in a simple, social interface, filling a set of needs somewhere between communal problem-solving and social narcissism. And last year, design site Colourlovers acquired it; Colourlovers also has tools for designers to post bits of their work.

It was a wonderful exit for a passion project from an all-around excellent hacker, one Kyle Bragger — or so we thought. Less than a full year after the acquisition, Forrst has been handed off to a third owner, Zurb.

Zurb is a web shop, plain and simple. You can think of it as a stable of top-shelf product people who come in and help you overhaul your website or mobile app or whatever.

So, what would a product shop want with a design/developer community? And why did the seemingly perfect marriage between Colourlovers and Forrst lead to such a speedy breakup?

First, we talked with Zurb. While the Zurbites didn’t want to discuss why the Colourlovers deal went sour, a company rep did tell VentureBeat via email, “We plan on keeping Forrst on http://www.forrst.com. The community and product will actively be maintained.

“In its current state, we don’t find the interface very compelling. We were intrigued by the existing community of designers/developers on the site, and the opportunity to evolve the interface into something great.”

For starters, that means improving the feedback loops built into the service, increasing opportunities for collaboration, and cranking out a mobile web app as soon as possible, Zurb stated in its official announcement of the acquisition.

Currently, the site has more than 50,000 accounts; no one will say how many of those accounts are active (Forrst was founded in 2009 and saw a lot of media/hacker love in 2010; traffic of late has been declining, according to various analytics tools).

Next, we talked to Bragger. The young builder-of-Internet-things went over to Colourlovers during last year’s acquisition. At the time, he told us that while it was weird to have to answer to a “boss” after working as an entrepreneur, he was excited about the deal and happy with the Colourlovers team.

But in another email today, he told us he’s much happier to be back on his own, working on a new product (more on that in a moment).

“I was definitely in a rut for a while there,” said Bragger. “I think Zurb will be a good home for Forrst. Hopefully, this time around it gets the attention it deserves.”

Forrst under Colourlovers had two updates in the 10 months it lived under the same roof, metaphorically speaking. First, there were some tweaks to the sharing of code and design snippets. Second, it enabled private member-to-member messaging. But any grand goals the Forrst Rangers had about growing their community or ramping up revenue were decidedly not realized in the new regime.

We do know that Colourlovers was the one to call it quits; the company approached Zurb (and possibly others) about buying Forrst. What we don’t know is why, exactly.

We’ve reached out to Colourlovers and will update this post when we hear back from that company. In the meantime, we can only look forward — forward to Forrst’s future at a shop that seems to see its potential, and forward to Bragger’s next release.

Bragger, who is now part of product-hacker collective Elepath, is working on Sets, a lightweight tool for making lists (or, if you will, sets) of links. It has the soul of Pinterest without all the thumbnails — a design element Bragger said he finds distracting. And it’s already gotten a Hacker News thumbs-up from Delicious creator Joshua Schachter.

“Sets is my take on what a curated bookmarking service should look be,” he said. “I used to be a pretty avid Pinboard user, but I started realizing that my own usage of the service was very much write-only; I’d drop links in and literally never read them again.” He said he had approximately the same relationship with Twitter: no consumption, write-only.

“Anyhow, I realized that there’s an interesting continuum that exists, where on one hand you have pure utility services, like Pinboard, and on the other hand, you have very social/broadcast stuff, like Twitter. Sets aims to exist in the middle — it’s useful to me as a way to track interesting URLs, but it also works well in helping me to share those with others who may find them of value.”

Sets is currently in an invite-only beta, but you can register your username now and wait for updates as they roll out. Bragger is currently putting the 1.0 spit-and-polish on the product, which he said won’t see any drastic changes between now and its public launch.

Bragger’s experience with building Forrst, selling it to a company that might have wanted to shutter it, and then watching it escape to what is hopefully a better home has been difficult. We asked him if he’d ever sell Sets or another product to another company.

“No, I can’t say that I would, at least at this juncture,” he replied.

And don’t expect to see him as part of an acqui-hiring deal anytime soon, either. “I’ve worked my ass off to hone my skills as a creator, and I’m very confident in own abilities, so that makes it easier to accept the risk that comes with working in early-stage companies,” he said.

“Having the creative freedom to work to my full potential is the only way I’ve ever felt truly fulfilled. I don’t feel like I have a ‘job,’ and I’d hate to look back on my career and wish I’d taken more risks.”

About 10 years ago, Don Melton was nervous as hell. Melton, Apple’s director of Internet technologies, had been tasked with building the Safari web browser and keeping the whole project secret.

While Apple has done a fairly good job of keeping hardware product designs secret (minus that one time), a web browser is a different story. What browsers are in use around the world are easily tracked by site administrators and web monitoring services.

Melton describes the ordeal of keeping Safari a secret in a blog post published late last night. He writes:

We weren’t under physical lockdown like Jony Ive’s design group was then, or like the iPhone team would be years later. But unless you knew who to look for, you were never going to find us on campus. And if you did, it’s unlikely you could tell what we were doing unless you caught one of us actually running Safari — something we usually did with our office doors closed.

I wasn’t worried about talk either. Forstall certainly trusted me – that’s one of the many things that made him a great boss. And I trusted my team — otherwise I wouldn’t have hired them. None of us nor any of the internal beta testers at Apple were going to snitch. There were too damn few beta testers, but they were above reproach.

Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist then. Nobody at Apple was stupid enough to blog about work, so what was I worried about?

Server logs. They scared the hell out of me.

Server logs make it easy to track which browser someone is currently using, so you have to be more clever than people with access to server logs.

Melton had one other big problem. Apple’s computer network has the same number (“17″) in front of its 16,777,216 static IP addresses. Which means anytime people did testing on Safari from Apple’s campus, it would be easy to spot the connection on a server log between the IP address number and the browser info.

To make sure server logs didn’t reveal Safari to the world before Apple did, Melton wrote code to create a fake “user agent string” on Safari. Instead of Safari, it appeared to server logs that Internet Explorer for Mac was in use. Later, Safari was masked to appear as if it was a Mozilla browser.

Melton writes:

Even though we operated the project like some CIA black op — with loyalty oaths and all — we couldn’t let Safari be “Safari” when we used it on the Apple campus network. Otherwise, some Web server administrator somewhere might be scanning their log files and notice the connection between user agent string and IP address origin. Then the big surprise Steve Jobs wanted to unveil at MacWorld on January 7, 2003, would be shot. And, likely, so would I.

So we hid my cleverly designed Safari user agent string whenever we were at Apple. And I say “my” because that’s actually one of the few pieces of code in Safari and WebKit that I can 1) claim to have designed and 2) is still actually in the source. Thank God my engineering team removed or refactored all my other hacks. I hired good people.

Whenever we were off the Apple campus network, e.g. in our homes, we modified Safari to enable its real user agent string. And we had to do this for compatibility testing. That allowed me to tweak the string for maximum compatibility with the websites of that time. Which explains why the Safari user agent string has so much extra information in it, e.g. KHTML, like Gecko — the names of other browser engines.

Finally, Melton had one more challenge. He needed to make sure the legitimate “user agent string” shipped with Safari on Jan. 7, 2003. So Melton and his team coded Safari so the real user agent string would automatically be enabled after a certain date. That way, the browser would finally display its info normally to server logs when regular people used the browser.

“Just about this time 10 years ago, days before it was to debut, Safari went from hiding its light under a bushel to being proud of who it really was,” Melton wrote.

Safari image via Apple

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Mobile was a top priority for companies in the last year, and for good reason. Mobile devices, including tablets, are becoming more popular than desktops for online access.

As a result, mobile projects are slated to outnumber PC development projects by 4:1 in the next three years. The number of mobile devices on the planet will outnumber people by 2016.

The challenge for development teams is how to adopt a mobile-first mindset. This approach requires you to put user experience at the center, offering a strong contextual and personalized experience. It also means offering that experience across multiple platforms and devices, introducing complexity and the need for specialized skills into the development process.

Plus, it requires expertise in how to build the right back-end infrastructure to support composite applications. today’s apps combine the context of an individual (using a mobile device) with a plethora of other information from multiple corporate back-end systems.

When you add to this the imperative of managing iterative app development across multiple client OS platforms, managing the development cycle has become ever more challenging. Companies are pressuring development leaders to rethink their mobile approach. In the coming year, it will become more important than ever to gear your development and operations teams towards mobile first. Here are the three pressing things to consider for 2013:

Bring mobile into your core dev team

With the range of skills required to support multiple mobile platforms, it is rapidly became common to outsource mobile development to companies with workers who have those specialized capabilities. However, the increasing prevalence of open web standards such as JavaScript and HTML5 linked to native mobile capabilities will make it easier to pull mobile development skills back in-house.

That is fortunate, because the development teams of the future will have to do short, ongoing iterations on mobile apps. Not having the right workers in-house complicates the development process and requires a sophisticated level of coordination and integration of external resource into your core development processes and tools.

It’s also important to think about whom you have to educate in order to execute a mobile-first development approach. Many web designers, for example, come from a desktop paradigm and may not have specialized in mobile user design. The changes in form factor, touch and contextual interaction do require a different interaction and design experience and therefore an evolution in designer skill set.

Tweak server architecture for mobile & web

Today’s composite apps have bigger implications for the back-end infrastructure that supports your apps. Most apps will depend on a range of back-end API services that enable interaction between the user interface on the mobile device and a back end that runs the business logic of the app, pulling information from multiple corporate systems.

This best lends itself to an API-centric cloud-service architecture, where your new back-end exposes APIs to the front end. This gives access to the information needed, and the mobile client has all of the user interface logic.

You gain the best of both worlds: A native experience on the mobile device, connected to a back end server that spits out JSON (JavaScript) data via REST-based services, as opposed to dealing with the presentation layer of the application.

It is important to note that these back-end apps are new apps (a.k.a. composite apps) and not just exposing existing back-end systems as is. These apps need to deliver new APIs that can support the personalized, contextual experience of mobile. Therefore, sheer pass-through technologies that do not aggregate and transform existing systems with business logic are not sufficient for true mobile-first development.

Increasingly, we see companies choosing a cloud-based infrastructure to run these back-end services. It is important to consider what your platform requirements for this infrastructure will be in 2013.

For example, how will you meet the fluctuating demand caused by volume of mobile devices accessing your app? This will require a new level of elasticity compared to previous back-end infrastructures. In addition, how will you support an agile development cycle that requires frequent app changes both to client-side (mobile user interface) and server-side logic? And how will you ensure the fault tolerance and redundancy of the back-end services infrastructure?

The key is to ensure that you have chosen an elastic, fault-tolerant cloud application platform that supports these new requirements created by your mobile and web apps.

Unify development & operations

Mobile-first strategies place new demands on collaboration and handoffs between development and operations teams. Although it emerged as a buzzword several years ago, “devops,” or the idea of improved collaboration between dev and ops teams, is no longer an optional area of focus. In fact, operations-related failures are among the most important points of application failure for mobile and web applications.

Research from Carnegie Mellon University has shown the leading causes of application failure today include failed software upgrades, inability to scale to meet unforeseen demand, resource exhaustion, and configuration errors. This means operational questions of how an application will perform once in production are just as important considerations as debugging an application’s core code before release.

For example, in an iterative development cycle, with frequent client- and server-side application updates, how do you ensure there are no configuration errors when an application is passed from development to production? Historically, this process involved a developer writing detailed guidelines for their operations team that outlined the exact process, including versions and libraries to install, and in which order.

However, the key to taking the error out of dev-to-ops handoffs is to automate this process. A developer should be able to hand the operations team an executable package that has been tested to automatically perform the steps required.

When it comes to failures due to application updates, how do you deal with the possibility that a new application version introduces unforeseen errors into an application already in production? This requires better real-time troubleshooting tools for applications in production — as compared to the traditional approach of a development team trying to reproduce production errors.

It is also a good idea in an iterative world to invest in “insurance,” the ability to easily roll back to previous application versions when required. At a high level, the application deployment process must be both highly productive (supporting frequent iterative updates) and churn out quality results.

Making mobile-first work

Although approaching a mobile-first environment can appear intimidating, if you re-think your team at the same time that you re-think the way you develop, deploy and manage apps, the process will become easier. The skills and tools required of development and operations teams in a mobile-first world are different, whether it be a focus on mobile user interface design, the skills to implement an API-centric cloud service architecture, to build an elastic backend infrastructure, or to address the question of avoiding application failures caused by the difficulty of devops collaboration. A

ddressing each of these requires not only investing in improved processes and increased automation but good old-fashioned teamwork.

Andi Gutmans is CEO and co-founder of Zend Technologies. Founded in 1999, Zend was instrumental in establishing PHP. Today, Zend helps others create and implement back-end infrastructure for web and mobile applications. Zend Server and Zend Studio are deployed at more than 40,000 companies worldwide.

Image credit: Shutterstock/leedsn

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Many times during product development, we face questions — “What’s the next feature that will be most valuable to our customers?” or “What feature do our customers want and don’t have?”

These questions are hard to answer and are most often dealt with by good analytics that you extract from the product itself, from customers, or by running gut-feeling A/B tests.

We take the lean startup concept very seriously and believe that you must have a good MVP (minimal viable product) that works — that is, accomplishes your goal, whether it’s conversion from free to paid or any other goal. Only then can you start adding other features requested by customers or those you think will add more value to the product.

But how will you know if those added features are worth the development time and other resources? Dummy features is one tool you can use to determine whether it is worth it to focus on and develop more features.

What’s a dummy feature? Basically, if you can’t decide what’s next, you do front-end implementations, add them to your service, and grab figures on how many customers tried to use them — in other words, slap up a fake button and see how many people push it.

Dummy features are great when you need to release your product as soon as possible.

A great example is in payment processing; it usually takes a lot of time to integrate a billing system and take payments from customers. So the first time we needed to take payments from customers, we just emulated all the billing forms and didn’t save any information or charge the users — yes, you heard correctly! We didn’t charge the users. Because at the first release of a product, what you really care about is (1) does it work? (2) do customers like it? and (3) what are the conversions? It’s well worth it to release the product faster and add the billing system later.

Another example is a dilemma we had about whether we should add an SMS notifications feature in which every time a new security vulnerability was found on a customer’s website, she’d get an SMS notification. Before we even implemented that feature, we inserted a check box with an SMS notification label and tallied how many customers checked it and wanted that feature (of course, we showed them a nice message box saying that feature would soon be available). Surprisingly, more than 60 percent wanted SMS notifications, so we implemented that feature. Now everyone is happy.

Bottom line: If you can’t decide whether or not a new feature should be added, just create the user interface, add the feature to the service, grab the analytics on how many users tried to use it, and you’ll make a more fact-based decision on what the next feature should be. In addition, dummy features can be used to shorten development times and bring the product out faster.

Yaron Tal has been working on turning ideas into marketable products for more 12 years. Currently, Tal is CTO of security company 6scan and blogs at Startup Internals, where this post originally appeared.

Top image courtesy of igor1308, Shutterstock

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Today Codeacademy launched a very simple way to create personalized virtual Christmas cards … and share them with the world. And into the bargain, you learn a little bit about some of the technologies that power the web: HTML, CSS, and perhaps even Javascript.

“Code cards are a really cool hands-on way to apply the HTML and CSS that people are learning with codecademy,” Codeacademy CEO Zack Sims told VentureBeat. “They can add elements with our interface (or drag and drop), see the HTML/CSS, tweak it, and send it to friends and family, who can play with the cards and make their own.”

I tried it myself, and it was easy and fun:

You simply select the elements that you want, copy the HTML and CSS, and then tweak settings as you wish. My simple three-minute creation adorns the top of this post.

(Disclosure: I’m not a newbie at HTML, CSS, and coding — I have done this before. However, I do think it’s simple enough that most people would be able to create something they’d be proud of.)

Why did Codeacademy build this?

“This is part of Codecademy’s continued emphasis on learning by doing,” Sims told VentureBeat. “We think it’s much easier to learn when you have a project in mind as opposed to learning a language (like, say, Python) just for the sake of learning it. Most of our tracks on the site focus on real-life projects as part of the learning process. We also recently launched a projects track that includes other cool apps and sites for people to build.”

Well merry Christmas (eve) from VentureBeat. And happy coding!

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Adobe has escalated its efforts to outlast the print era with a string of announcements about new Photoshop features and Creative Cloud, its decentralized reincarnation of Creative Suite.

While other recent product launches from Adobe — think Edge and Muse — have been focused on bringing old-school designers into the digital fold, today’s announcements are equally about allowing modern designers and developers to work together in a cloud-based environment.

But on to the reason you clicked this post: Photoshop updates.

In a phone conference with Creative Cloud marketing director Scott Morris, we learned that Adobe is giving Photoshop a bunch of new bells and whistles: the HiDPI/Retina support it announced last night, new time-saving workflows, CSS support, support for larger JPEG image files, conditional Actions, default type styles, and Smart Object support for Blur adjustments and the much-loved lose-10-pounds-in-30-seconds Liquify filter.

Photoshop is also getting spiffy new 3D graphics tools: better image-based lighting, improvement for texture details, and an overall 3D effects tune-up.

And that’s just the beginning of the company’s announcements today; the real meat of the news is the cloud-based stuff.

The new Creative Cloud Connection brings us desktop syncing of files, drag-and-drop sharing, and automatic saving of files to the cloud as well as to your folders. You can also share collaboratively, whether with one person or your entire team, whether a single file or a whole folder.

It’s Adobe’s answer to all the Dropbox-like cloud-based storage and collaboration services, the biggest difference being that Adobe’s version is designed from the ground up to work with the tools creatives use every day — not just Photoshop, mind you — and contains tools specifically tailored for working within creative teams or with external clients. Also, Creative Cloud team users will have access to enterprise-grade support from Adobe.

Another cool note for mobile-shy designers: Muse, the InDesign/Dreamweaver hybrid that makes designing websites easy for print people, is now going to support mobile and tablet development. Since Adobe is very much in the mobile web/responsive design camp, Muse for mobile will focus on the mobile web rather than native applications.

“Any print designer who’s comfortable with InDesign is going to be comfortable with Muse out of the gate,” said Morris.

Finally Adobe has put together a library of video courses (again going back to that original point: Adobe wants to make print oldsters good at digital media) for Creative Cloud. Created by a range of experts, including non-Adobe partners, the tutorials are designed to work with Creative Cloud and to teach everything from prototyping to publishing.

“We want to make customers successful as they’re trying new things,” said Morris. “It’s not focused on things like an introduction to Photoshop.”

Top image courtesy of AISPIX by Image Source, Shutterstock

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In fact, according to the recent survey by mobile app tools vendor Kendo UI, 94 percent of developers are either using HTML5, or plan to start using it this year, leaving only a minuscule six percent who have no plans to develop with HTML5 before 2013 rolls around in just two short months.

That’s the kind of stat that is sometimes easy to manipulate when there’s a larger percentage in the wishy-washier “planning” segment, but not in this case, with a full 63 percent of developers using HTML5 today.

That’s impressive.

HTML5 is an updated version of the old-school hyper-text markup language that makes up much of the web today. It enables developers to build on their existing knowledge of web technologies such as HTML, Javascript, and cascading style sheets to create mobile apps through frameworks such as Adobe’s PhoneGap rather than having to learn Objective-C to write full-native iPhone/iPad apps, or Java to write Android apps. Probably even more importantly, by using cross-platform technologies like PhoneGap, HTML5 enables developers to write their apps once and deploy on all major mobile platforms.

Given the numbers who are already using HTML5, it’s no shock that 82 percent of developers also say that the technology will be important to their jobs in the next year, and a further 12 percent believe it will be become important within the next two years.

Developers’ rationale for using and preferring HTML5 is no shock to anyone who’s ever developed native apps for multiple mobile platforms. Sixty-two percent said that HTML5′s ability to enable cross-platform support was an important factor in choosing the technology, with another third saying that the availability of tools and code libraries make it appealing.

But the biggest reason developers like HTML5?

Familiarity. Almost three-quarters of developers said that HTML, Javascript, and CSS were familiar languages which enabled easy access to mobile app markets.

And what about Facebook’s move away from HTML5. Apparently, that hasn’t shaken developers’ belief in the technology — half of them weren’t even aware of the move. Of those who did, however, while 17 percent had less faith in HTML5 after the news, 18 percent had more faith.

The survey is obviously from a company with a vested interest in HTML5 adoption, but it jibes with what I’ve heard from people like Andi Gutmans, key developer of the PHP programming language and current CEO of Zend, who is pushing what he calls cloud-connected mobile apps and just released a version of Zend Studio that enables developers to build native mobile apps with familiar web technologies.

Which, frankly, just makes sense if you don’t want to build the same app three times for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone … and if your app is not the most computationally intensive app in the world and absolutely needs to be fully native for performance reasons.

photo credit: codepo8 via photopin cc

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Yesterday at ZendCon, Andi Gutmans unveiled new capability in Zend Studio to build “cloud-connected mobile apps.” The latest version of Zend Studio helps developers create web services, intelligent mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and even your app’s user interface, all in one connected, simplified development environment. In fact, I watched Zend’s Kent Mitchell do it in about 10 minutes.

“It’s pretty cool,” IBMs’ Ryan Watkins told me last night at a ZendCon reception. “It definitely makes it look easy.”

Princeton University’s Henry Umansky, who builds internal web applications for the university’s staff and students, was even more effusive.

“It looks impressive! I think it will be a complete paradigm shift in the way people develop for mobile first,” he said. “And it’s excellent for rapid prototyping. The stakeholders for our projects are generally very visual people.”

The new Zend Studio integrates Cordova, the open-source project better known as PhoneGap, to help developers launch native apps for multiple mobile platforms from a single codebase. That’s what was attractive to Quicken Loan‘s Jim Starr.

“Our developers want to write once and deploy everywhere,” he told me. “I’m intrigued by that.”

Another developer, who didn’t want to be named as he did not have permission to speak for his company, was cautiously optimistic, saying that though he didn’t develop much for mobile at the moment, “things are shifting that way.”

A number of developers I spoke to were, like him, cautiously examining the idea of being able to develop for mobile — almost like a child with a new toy that he or she has not yet determined is fun or scary. For many PHP developers, it seems, the transition from back-end server-side development to new user-interface-centric mobile development is a bit of a leap.

One thing that might be interesting from a Zend point of view: developers who use PHP but don’t use Zend might now be convinced to use Zend’s development stack: Studio, Server, and so on.

“It looks pretty cool. I haven’t used Zend Studio yet,” said Dru Spackman, who builds in the NetBeans IDE but is now considering a change.

photo credit: CalEvans via photopin cc

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

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Now stop imagining and just watch the video below.

I just interviewed Kent Mitchell, Zend’s senior director of product management. Zend, of course, is the company that makes the most-used PHP development environment. It’s the company started by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the primary originators of the PHP language (after founder Rasmus Lerdorf).

PHP jockies out there will be impressed, I think, to find that Mitchell is not just a marketing drone … he’s a full-on, hard-core, honest-to-goodness developer.

And given that Zend just announced the ability to create mobile apps directly within Zend Studio, I challenged him to show me how it works, from start to finish.

I think when you’ll watch that you will find he came pretty damn close:

As Mitchell says, “In just a few minutes, I’ve created a new web service, I’ve deployed it into the cloud, and I’ve created some new widgets on this mobile site. Now, we want to turn around and make this a native application.”

And he does, in just a few more clicks, create a project that is tied to the Xcode tools that iOS developers would normally use to create native apps. The same functionality, of course, is possible for Android applications.

Frankly, this is pretty amazing.

While creating apps, developers can test and view their apps right on their development machine, and integrated debugging is included. It’s an over-used expression, but this is a game-changer for developers and enterprises.

Photo credit: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

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New: watch a PHP developer create a native mobile app in 10 minutes.

This morning at ZendCon, Zend chief executive Andi Gutmans announced that Zend Studio 10 will let PHP developers prototype and build native mobile apps right from the language they know best, PHP. The new capability includes a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop mobile interface builder, integration with the Apache project’s Cordova to access native mobile APIs such as those for cameras and accelerometers, and built-in PhoneGap integration so developers can publish native app packages to the various app stores.

Zend CEO Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012

This is a major game-changer for PHP developers, who until now have been shut out of the mobile app revolution. Apps for iPhone and iPad are coded in Objective-C, while apps for Google’s Android mobile operating system are built in Java. This new announcement means that millions of new developers have just been invited to the mobile development party.

“We’re the only vendor that is really taking a really strong approach on this,” Gutmans told me last week in a sneak preview. “This is a seamless development experience.”

This new capability, Gutmans said, allows developers to build out backend code and front-end interface at the same time. That’s actually the hard part, according to Zend SMO Elaine Lennox.

“Modern apps connect to multiple different back-end systems such as CRM systems, cloud services, and social networks. With all these different data services in lot of different places, wiring them together can be harder to build than the app,” she said. “But now, a developer can go into Zend studio, create the front-end with a WYSIWYG interface builder, and connect it all on the backend.”

But it’s not just about mobile.

Instead, Gutman’s vision is about two massive revolutions: mobile and cloud. The new Zend Server is built for cloud, whether developers use Amazon, Rackspace, Windows Azure, or other clouds. In the new development architecture, apps access clouds, which then access APIs, social services, or SaaS options such as Salesforce.

“We’re giving you a common workflow between client and cloud for building mobile apps,” Gutmans told me. “We’re defining a new architecture: cloud service architecture. I think it’s completely a first … I haven’t seen it before.”

Source: Zend

Zend’s view of the mobile app

Andi Gutmans, who is also one of the primary authors of the PHP language, had hinted at new mobile options for PHP developers to VentureBeat three weeks ago.

Zend and PHP have made significant inroads into the enterprise market in the last few years — Gutmans told me that “when we go up against Java or .Net, we win — and the new integrated development environment for mobile, cloud, and business applications is part of a new mobile-first push for the company.

Citing a study saying that mobile development projects will outnumber PC-focused projects by four to one, and that the world will have 7.4 billion mobile devices by 2015, Gutmans wants to help enterprises create “composite” apps, apps that combine intelligence from internal business systems, external networks and applications, and personalizations to individual users.

The new Zend Studio will allow drag-and-drop connection to various cloud services as well as the visual creation of mobile interfaces, allowing developers to manage all the components of development for complex, connected mobile apps up in one interface.

“We’re bringing mobile and cloud together,” Gutmans said.

And that’s going to give PHP developers — and PHP-using enterprises — a massive new opportunity to use familiar tools to create new experiences for users in the office, and out.

photo credit: Sugar Daze via photopin cc

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A certain kind of developer loves to hate on PHP. They are really going to hate where PHP’s custodians are taking it next.

PHP was created by Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. In 1997, Israeli programmers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the parser, creating the base for PHP 3. By 1999, they had built the Zend Engine, which is still the interpreter for PHP.

Update October 18: Andi Gutmans just gave us more details about where PHP is going in mobile.

Gutmans and Suraski continued their partnership with Zend Technologies, a commercial entity that creates add-on products and services for PHP developers, particularly developers in the enterprise.

Today, after multiple massive iterations to the codebase, 35 percent of web traffic is handled by PHP, says Gutmans. Wikipedia says 75 percent of websites use PHP. Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Photobucket are all built in PHP. WordPress, the most popular blogging platform in the world, runs on PHP and probably accounts for half of that 35 percent. Most of the other major content management systems, such as Drupal and Joomla, are also built in PHP.

No respect?

Still, the language can’t seem to get any respect and has been derided for years by programmers coding in C, Java, .NET, Python, or Ruby. In terms of trends, PHP as a search term has been dropping for years, and the mobile app revolution has led to the revival of Objective-C and Java.

So is the programming language that powers so much of the web disappearing gently into the night?

Not if Gutmans has anything to say about it. VentureBeat talked to him about PHP and the future, and he’s more bullish than ever, especially when it comes to the mobile-focused ace up his sleeve.

Riding the U.S.S. Enterprise

“All dynamic languages are gaining share from Java and .NET right now,” says Gutmans. “We’re getting a lot of benefit.”

Source: Wikipedia

Andi Gutmans

So the noise around trendier technologies like Ruby on Rails or Node.js doesn’t especially bother him. Mindshare is nice, of course, but market share is nicer. And market share is what Gutmans is focused on, especially in the enterprise.

“From a maturity point of view,” Gutmans told me, “I don’t think any other dynamic language right now has the full tool set. Our competition is Java and .NET … never with other dynamic languages.”

While he likes what Ruby on Rails is doing, and thinks there are some things there that PHP can learn and grow from, Gutmans points to PHP’s massive support in packaged solutions like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento.

“We’re better off than we were eight years ago … today we’re the only ones who have really hit the mainstream enterprise,” says Gutmans. “We do believe that the momentum and the size of PHP will continue. We don’t see it slowing down right now.”

Gutmans speaks with the enthusiasm of a founder; of course, there are other companies catering to the PHP-related needs of the enterprise. But Zend remains one of the biggest and best-known, especially due to its provenance.

And he’s got a point: Two-thirds of developers in a recent study reported spending half their time in PHP. And in a recent study by Rails developer Marc Gayle, half of all developer job postings on Craigslist call for PHP developers. When I talked to Gayle, he surmised the reason might be PHP’s super-popular content management systems.

“I think that is skewing the results,” he said. “But I can’t be sure.”

And a mysterious mobile story, coming soon

When it comes to mobile apps, Gutmans sides with the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich in a firmly held belief that the web and web languages will eventually catch up and win out over native stacks.

But, he hinted to me, PHP and Zend will be providing client-side app-enabling tools.

Gutmans declined to comment further, saying he would only announce the full details at Zend’s conference in late October. However, it sounds like PHP will have a mobile app story of some sort, in spite of being the web’s predominant server-side language.

What that looks like and how it will be distributed is still mysterious. But a strong mobile story, says Gutmans, will only help PHP continue to grow.

It’s hard to argue with that.

photo credit: Red Bonzai

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It’s not easy — I’ve spoken to multiple design and development companies who are trying — but it is possible. 37Signals is probably the uber-example, but it’s not unlikely that soon Detroit Labs will be another. And the company is doing it by following the Google model: 20 percent of each employee’s time is spent on projects and products for Detroit Labs itself.

“Because we do premium services, we can fund ourselves,” says chief executive Paul Glomski.

The company has created internationally recognized apps for massive clients, including an ordering app for Dominos that currently brings in $150 million a year — approaching 10 percent of the pizza giant’s revenue. Apps like this, and the Chevy GameTime app that had 700,000 downloads before last year’s Super Bowl and won the company a producing credit for a Gold Lion at Cannes Festival of Creativity, bring in enough revenue so Detroit Labs doesn’t need to push its developers for billable hours.

The Chevy GameTime app

But Glomski doesn’t have time for the presumption that a services company isn’t a valid investment.

“I reject the notion that you can’t get high multiples with what we’re doing,” he says. “We’re already in the 20-100x range for our current level of investment, and I believe we could get to a $100 million exit with the trajectory we’re on.”

The company has grown to 30 people profitably, and Glomski makes the point persuasively that this scale gives Detroit Labs more time than the average startup to work on projects — essentially, more at-bats to try stuff and see what works.

“We have multiple chances to fail,” Glomski says.

Not that he intends to, but Glomski is very aware that most startups fail, and most apps fail, and most businesses fail. Having a profitable business that supports what is currently a half-dozen projects and products is like startup insurance: more runway, more chances to get it right, more chances to hit a home run.

The products his team is currently working on include a gamified betting app in conjunction with existing app publisher SideBets, a game, and a second-screen social TV app that is very close to a partnership deal with a major network.

The second-screen app is potentially a very interesting, very explosive opportunity because, as Glomski says, Detroit Labs is the company that figured out second-screen apps first, with Chevy GameTime. With that success and learning under the company’s belt — and with a partnership with a major TV network — this has a real shot at home run status.

The challenge for every studio that wants to be a product company is focus: clients phone, but your own projects don’t.

Glomski is very aware of this and is fairly fanatical about carving out time, saying that it is a challenge, especially for smaller companies. And he rejects the notion suggested in a Fast Company article that employee’s 20 percent time is spent “screwing around.”

“That’s totally not true … our 20 percent time is equally as serious and as intense as work we do for our clients — and sometimes more.”

But Detroit Labs’ 20 percent policy is as much about clients — and developers — as it is about creating the next billion-dollar idea.

“Great developers can work anywhere they want in any city,” Glomski told me. “We build great talent by giving them interesting projects.”

And he’s betting that the great talent is going to not only continue to produce premium apps for high-end customers, but also several major spin-out (or spin-in) venture opportunities.

Image credit: John Koetsier

FatFractal launched today as a mobile development platform-cum-backend, a cloud-based stack for your –

HEY! You in the back! Stifle that yawn, mister. These guys say they’re different.

I know, I know — they all say they’re different. It seems these days that not a week rolls by without some new, buzzword-tricked-out development platform launching, usually cloud-friendly and mobile-focused, always with promises that this platform is the best solution for efficiency and the first to (insert overblown marketing assertion here).

But FatFractal’s pitch caught our eye because its promise was different and imminently practical. Among other claims, this company promises to be the stack with the lowest price. Period.

Of course, FatFractal offers other amenities, as well: declarative security, custom code, native code support for mobile devices and tablets, an events model, no boilerplates. The founders also wanted to build an engine-based platform for dynamic scaling, a platform that would support any and all languages and infrastructures. Also, a company rep told VentureBeat via email, “They liked developing on local machines and insisted on deploying to the cloud without reconfiguration.”

Still, we’ve read similar statements from every PaaS/BaaS startup. The price was what struck us this time.

During FatFractal’s public beta, its Silver Tier services are free of charge. Can’t beat free. Once the public beta ends and/or other tiers are needed, services range up to $400 per month for unlimited domains, 25 million API calls, 30GB of storage, 25GB of outgoing bandwidth, and unlimited incoming bandwidth.

For comparison, the same figures on Parse would push you into the Enterprise tier (you’d have to work directly with Parse’s salespeople on pricing). And 25 million API calls on StackMob would run you $3,000 per month. With Kinvey, you’d hit the $400 monthly figure at around 14,000 users for your app.

Granted, the offerings and services aren’t exactly equivalent, but if FatFractal sticks around, it’ll be interesting to see how its pricing fares in the ever-expanding marketplace of mobile app development tools.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

How do you promote your app before it’s even launched? Or create buzz around just one more app in a sea of 600,000 others?

One option is Ooomf, the mobile app discovery platform that helps developers find early adopters, invite them into the app creation process, and build a bridge out of app store oblivion. And while Ooomf is all about helping app developers, the Montreal-based company just got a little kick in the seat of its own pants, cashing in $500,000 in seed funding from Real Ventures and BDC Venture Capital, and launching into public beta today.

Source: John Koetsier

Mikael Cho at Grow Conference

I met co-founder and chief executive Mikael Cho at Grow 2012 a few weeks ago, and he’s passionate about helping developers find early users. He likens Ooof to Kickstarter, in that the service creates a bond between app developers and early users — and builds on that as a bridge to commercial success.

The service itself allows app users to find the best existing apps via a curated list of categorized apps.

Or, for apps that have not yet been released, Ooomf gives users a peek into coming releases, which they can request early access to, or get more information on.

Once they’ve become part of an extended team of beta users, developers can start asking questions and gather data. For example, developers might wonder which icon is the best, or what tagline most succinctly captures the essence of their app.

Through Ooomf, early adopters can tell developers their opinions, and developers can then make decisions on future directions with a little more input. Currently, that’s happening via the Ooomf website, but the Ooomf app for iOS will shortly make that available on mobile.

Other app discovery platforms exist, including the Facebook App Center, AppFlow on iOS, YouAppi on both iOS and Android, and MapSaurus on Android.

But I haven’t yet seen an app discovery engine that allows users to become part of the app development team.

Now Ooomf has $500,000 to prove that this is the secret sauce that will drive app discovery and marketing to new heights.

Image credits: Ooomf

Just the mention of the word “tween” conjures up images of Bratz-toting, Twilight-reading, Justin Bieber-loving fans. But when you strip away the generalizations, a surprising reality emerges: this demographic controls nearly $50 billion in spending power — and they’re powerful brand advocates (just look at what they’ve done for stars like Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry).

What’s more, they’re highly connected. Nearly 50 percent own smartphones. More than two-thirds have broadband access, and they consume, on average, a whopping 7.5 hours of media per day, two hours of which are spent on a mobile device. All of this adds up to a lucrative, highly engaged audience for game developers.

It’s no secret that adult females are some of the largest users of casual games, and in the 8 to 12-year-old tween demographic, it’s no different— more than 50 percentof tween girls play games on a regular basis. What makes the tween-girl market different, and frankly more exciting, is that it’s still in its infancy. There are plenty of opportunities for new entrants. Without access to Facebook, these girls haven’t been exposed to Farmville or Words With Friends, which means there’s still lots of room for the next big tween girl franchise (and licensing opportunities to boot).

So, what makes these girls tick, and what will get them playing your games? Here are some insights on how to create games that tween girls will love…

Understand the psychology: An informed approach to developing for this audience means understanding tween girls’ behavior and what motivates them. Between the ages of 8 and 12, girls are just starting to become aware of and experiment with their appearance, which explains why beauty and dress-up games reign supreme. They’re also interested in imagining and acting out their future lives, making role-playing games a great fit — particularly those that enable them to try various jobs on for size, like playing veterinarian or head chef. Self-expression is another hallmark of this demographic, making personality quizzes and creation games especially popular.

Don’t get stuck in one genre: Sure, plenty of girls love pink and dressing up, but many also love adventure games and other genres conventionally associated with boys. Girls have an endlessly diverse set of interests, but what is perhaps their most universal characteristic is a desire to feel special. No matter what kind of game you create, you should cater to them.

Pay attention to market trends: Fads move especially fast with this age group, which is why it is important to stay up-to-date on what’s popular now. Read relevant magazines, browse websites, and listen to music to figure out what tweens are into. Today’s Justin Bieber could be tomorrow’s Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and you don’t want to be caught with an outdated game.

Keep it simple: Educational games can be great learning tools, but if you are reaching tweens in an environment where they’re expecting a casual or social gaming experience, keeping it simple and light-hearted is the way to go. Games that are text heavy, have lengthy tutorials, or complex control schemes are likely to fall flat with this audience.

Don’t skimp on production quality: Simple shouldn’t mean bland. Particularly within genre-themed games, maintaining a high design standard is key to engaging this very visual audience.

Show parents some love: In many cases, parents are the gatekeepers to tweens’ online activities, which is why it’s important to include them in your strategy. Use parent-friendly language. Parents should easily be able to find terms, privacy policies, and other details that are important to them when monitoring their children’s online behavior.

The tween girls market is one of the fastest growing corners of the gaming industry, and it’s poised to take off in a major way. Developers should approach this like they would any new niche market: do your homework, immerse yourself in the trends, and above all — create something you’re proud of! Tweens are very clued in and connected socially, and whether you love your game or hate it, they’ll know and respond accordingly.

Peter Hofstede is Game Director at Spil Games, the world’s largest gaming platform with more than 180 million monthly active users, which also runs GirlsGoGames.com. He is responsible for all of Spil Games’ game development and oversees the firm’s Dutch, German and Chinese game studios. He has over 10 years of experience in the gaming world. 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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In the ever-unfolding drama of the technology world, the conflict dominating the stage is how to successfully create mobile apps. The question persists in front and behind of the curtain as entrepreneurs, investors, and executives act out their roles before a growing audience of smartphone users.

Multiple plotlines are at work. It makes for a complicated narrative of monetization schemes such as real-time bidding for advertising, premium business models, and apps with no revenue stream that run on a dedicated user base and hope. The growing importance of a strong mobile presence, combined with a shortage of talented mobile developers, further adds to this tension.

What a scene for HackRocket to enter.

HackRocket is an online iOS bootcamp featuring a cast of mobile development and business experts as instructors. It has officially opened its doors for applications and is ready to put the next generation of aspiring founders through its training program.

The 12-week program occurs completely online via live video feeds. It’s designed for students who already have a background in technology. The curriculum focuses on iOS development, with 10 hours of coding instruction a week at its core. In addition, it sports six hours a week of guest lectures that deal with topics relating to entrepreneurship.

“The course covers everything from A to Z,” founder Paul Vieira said. “We will offer help with design, app store optimization, copywriting, wire framing, budget creation, UI/UX, marketing, monetization, as well as language instruction. It is not just about building an app, it is about building a business.”

Classes are from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, which makes it most convenient for people in Europe and the U.S. Interested people in Australia and Asia can also participate, if they are willing to stay up late. Applications will close on August 31. Tuition is $3,500. The first class consist of 26 people and classes begin on September 10. To apply, go to http://hackrocket.com/apply/.

One of the featured instructors is Justin Beck, a young entrepreneur who has worked at both Google and Microsoft and currently runs his own gaming company, PerBlue. He has talked at conferences around the world. He covers how to translate coding skills into lucrative opportunities. According to Beck, many developers aspire to be found startups but do not have the right mindset.

“Technology is the underpinning of everything,” Beck said. “But to start a successful company, you have to have understand business, too. Being a good CEO is also about ‘softer’ things like public speaking, money management, organization, and social skills. It is about taking ownership and shifting your thought processes. These behaviors can fundamentally change the trajectory of a person’s life.”

The bootstrap mentality is a key component of HackRocket. Other programs, like Code Academy in Chicago and Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco, are location-based. HackRocket’s cources occur remotely and online. Without the structure of a classroom, students have to be highly motivated and self-directed to benefit from the curriculum.

The primary program instructor is veteran mobile developer Bear Cahill. Over the course of his career, Cahill has helped develop over 80 mobile apps and is familiar with just about every programming language out there. He has worked with major companies like IBM, Ericsson, and Travelocity as well as with small startups and individuals. The veteran developer is a firm believer in the importance of practical, as well as theoretical, experience.

“Many of the training courses out there are either video, so there is no live interaction, or condensed, so there is no time to go off and work on assignments,” Cahill said. “This is a new paradigm on the language learning model. My favorite part is hearing new ideas and seeing them develop overtime and come to life. With this type of course, we can all benefit from that.”

The students are expected to tune in daily to the lectures, but they must also draw on their own initiative to collaborate with their classmates during off hours. In addition to a lower cost and the convenience of being able to learn from anywhere, HackRocket also allows participants free time to work on independent projects.

It’s a potential treasure trove for those who develop for Microsoft, or work in a Microsoft environment, and want to broaden their skills. I’ve included a few of the potentially most interesting below — but be sure to check out the full selection.

Web geeks who want to start building Windows 8 apps might want to check out Programming Windows 8 Apps, which will show you how to use your Javascript, HTML, and CSS skills to program for the desktop in Windows 8.

Or, if you’re a mobile developer and are thinking of possibly throwing an app on the Windows Phone platform, Ligman has listed a few books for you as well that will have you up and running with Silverlight, XAML, and sprites in no time.

IT administrators might find this set of books more helpful: a Microsoft Office 365 handbook for the more adventurous, and Office 2010 for the majority of you who are in corporate environments that stay just slightly off the bleeding edge.

Staying with IT theme, Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions might be useful. Server room jockies will likely find something to learn in Windows Server 2012. And database administrators? There are a least eight different SQL e-books in Ligman’s list — all for free.

None these will be helpful, of course, if you’re not in a Microsoft shop.

But for those who are, take a look at both this list and a secondary list that Ligman posted that includes resources on developing for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud:

Image credit: Vladimir Melnikov/ShutterStock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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CEO Brendan McCorkle

CloudMine started out as a business-to-business big data service, but quickly pivoted into a instant, managed backend for app developers. The goal: enable app developers to focus on the front end of their applications … the user interface features that users actually touch, rather than the infrastructure and data management that enables them.

VentureBeat spoke to chief executive Brendan McCorkle yesterday.

“Any time you build an app there’s all this scaffolding that needs to go up: infrastructure, account management, data security and other basic services just so an app can run,” says McCorkle. “We build that scaffolding so you don’t have to.”

For example, a local business-finding app might need geolocation support, user registration, some definition of public and private data, and more. CloudMine enables all the backend components of this through a single API … which has the potential to significantly simplify development and shorten build time.

“Essentially, we can abstract away the backend. We can abstract away EC2,” McCorkle said, referring to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, a common cloud computing service for developers. “That enables you as an app developer to focus on your core competency and do your thing.”

For almost all apps, he argues, the server side infrastructure is not what makes a developer’s app unique. Connection to the cloud for data and computing are essential, in fact business critical, but they are not what the user sees. They are the underlying components that support the app, and CloudMine’s goal is to provide them quickly and easily.

In addition, the company promises benefits that extend beyond simplification and cost savings.

Because CloudMine abstracts the backend, app makers are able to host their data on multiple Amazon availability zones without any additional work, significantly improving the chances of their service staying up even if a part of Amazon’s cloud goes down. In fact, McCorkle told VentureBeat, this could even extend to mirroring on multiple clouds from additional providers such as Rackspace, further increasing reliability with zero additional developer overhead.

The company is seeing some traction in two very different spaces: enterprise and startups.

CloudMine has two Fortune 500 customers who are currently using the company’s backend to expose legacy data to mobile applications. And startup clients are using the backend infrastructure to rapidly prototype and deploy sophisticated mobile apps.

CloudMine began its young life at Startup Weekend Philly just nine months ago, and is currently running more than 1500 apps on the platform. Pricing is simple: $.05 per active user per month, or custom pricing for large data consumers.

The company received $20,000 in seed investment, and a $100k investment from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania. CloudMine is based in Philadelphia.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Sir Richard Branson: When he’s not figuring out commercial space travel, he’s making it rain on the kids from Codecademy. Gotta love the guy.

Branson is just one of a whole school of big fish who’ve chipped in on Codecademy’s newest round of funding. The team took home $10 million in toto, and the round also brought in Silicon Valley firms such as Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins as well as Russian entrepreneur/investor Yuri Milner.

Codecademy, the drop-dead simple site that teaches you how to code, also saw participation from all its previous investors (Tim O’Reilly, Mike Arrington, Ron Conway, and a few others), a good sign, to be sure.

Codecademy certainly deserves the new round. It’s used previous funding to aggressively deliver on its promise of teaching the world to code. When the startup launched at a Y Combinator demo day eleven short months ago, we were impressed by a) the team’s youth, and b) the elegant execution on a truly worthwhile mission.

“This is the first time programming has been truly democratized,” said co-founder Zach Sims at that time. “It’s available to anyone with a computer and it’s easy to follow. We think creating a new generation of programmers will help to raise employment and the standard of living for those individuals. It’s preparing the world for the future.”

Since the launch, the team has rolled out more coding instruction in new programming languages, an ambitious challenge for 2012 called Code Year, and a platform for those who want to teach others how to code.

In the near future, expect to see Codecademy continuing its growth by expanding into new geographies and new languages — and not just programming languages.

“The new money will be used to internationalize Codecademy and bring it to places it’s already,” Sims told VentureBeat in an email today. “More than 50 percent of our users are international, and we’re looking to use this capital and Index’s international expertise to further our international adoption.”

Sims said the team already has support from its userbase for this kind of expansion. “Our course creator community is vibrant, with tens of thousands of courses completed in English and other languages,” he said. “We’re starting to see courses in other languages, and scores of users have started translating our existing courses into other languages.”

The nine-person team has its headquarters in New York City. To date, more than 25,000 people have created courses, and millions of individuals have used the site to learn about computer programming. More than 50 million exercises have been completed, with more than 100 code snippets submitted for a curriculum of more than 400 separate courses.

Image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Mozilla has just launched Thimble, a tidy new way to create simple websites from within a browser window.

Thimble is visual enough for coding newbies, but it also lets you play around under the hood with HTML and CSS — a great way to learn how to code in a hands-on environment. You can start making a site from scratch, or you can choose to tinker around with a pre-existing template.

Once you’re done creating your site, you can publish it with a single click, then continue to edit and tweak as needed. You can also choose to preview your work prior to publishing it. Thimble also offers basic debugging, which Mozilla refers to as a sort of spell-checker for code.

The template projects are great for getting your feet wet and learning as you go; they can help absolute novices acquire comfort and familiarity in the basics of code-writing for the web. A few of these projects come from Mozilla’s Web Arcade, an 80s game-themed series that teaches webmaking basics.

Overall, Thimble is simple enough for even elementary-school kids to use, and it won’t confound more stuck-in-their-ways users, either. It’s the perfect intro to coding for beginners, and it fits right into the proven Codecademy paradigm of in-browser code instruction.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Thimble, writes Mozilla communications czar Matt Thompson on the company blog, is “at the heart of Mozilla Webmaker’s mission to move people from using the web to making the web — and to create a more web-literate planet.”

As part of the launch, Mozilla is putting a fresh gust of wind under the wings of Webmaker.org, its project for technological literacy amongst the normals of the world. The project is all about understanding and control, about revealing the “man behind the curtain” and showing regular Internet users that there’s nothing magical or mysterious about how websites work and that learning to code is within their grasp.

“The web is becoming the world’s second language, and a vital 21st century skill,” reads the new Webmaker site.

“Digital literacy today is as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Mozilla believes it’s crucial that we give people the skills they need to understand, shape, and actively participate in that world, instead of just passively consuming it.”

Image courtesy of Yuri Acurs, Shutterstock

Everyone wants to make their site/product/app/widget go viral. Unfortunately, most of the time when people say that, they mean “I want the world to do all my marketing for me.” Good luck with that.

Let’s start with some wisdom from about 2500 years ago, when mobile apps were long, sharp, and nasty:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

- Ecclesiastes 9:11

In other words, marketing dweeb, going viral has a lot to do with luck. That is, unless your mobile app jumps up and pokes users in the eye. Unless it makes a dent. Unless, in other words, it rocks.

But there are some things you can do to tip the scales of fate. Here’s a quick primer.

Works for one

You desperately want people to share your app, so that user numbers will skyrocket and you can sell the company to Zynga for $500 million dollars six days after launch. But before people share, there needs to be something to share.

That something is value.

Yeah, sorry, but this is the hard part: you gotta actually create something of value to someone. It’s very challenging to get around this almost-always-essential first step. (If you do find a way around it, however, be sure to share it with me, privately.)

You need to have actual value for the first use, because (oddly) there is not just one first user. There are many first users: the genuine first, the first in her circle of friends, the first in his company, the first in her city. Your app needs to be useful for each of these firsts.

Better together

Anything that gets more valuable and useful when there are more users or instances benefits from network effects. The classic example is the fax machine: one is completely useless. The same could be said of a social network — Facebook for one is pretty much a diary. Good luck IPOing that.

Build in value that grows as the user base grows. And do it in two ways.

First, make your user better when she shares something from your app. Give her props, give her warm fuzzies, make her seem hip and cool, or let her give something of value to her friends.

Second, make the service more valuable for every user when he shares with his friends. When we all got Hotmail email addresses back in the 90s (remember HoTMaiL), we could communicate better. When all of your family is on Path, you stay in touch easier.

Built-in, not bolted on

Social is not a plug-in, nor is it an API. Social is an essential layer or a core component of a viral app.

Draw Something may be going the wrong way right now, but it’s still a great example. The app absolutely requires social interaction, leading users to, in some cases, actually force their friends to install the game.

Now that’s viral contagion!

Essentially, this requires thinking of social from the beginning, rather than after you’ve finished your app and just started dreaming about marketing, and then building it in to the user experience.

Chuck the churn

This is not advice for your friendly milkmaid. Instead, it is an exhortation to keep the users you get.

Unless you want to run a continual pyramid scheme, losing users quickly will kill even a hot viral product. The danger is that you will spend your entire business existence running the hamster wheel of simultaneously acquiring and losing users, and never develop a mature, stable, and solid user base which can actually be monetized.

That may not be a problem, of course, if your strategy is just to get acquired in the mad-scramble-for-scale phase. If so, more power to you. Like OMGpop, however, you will have some long-term issues.

To prevent excessive churn, design your app so that it has not only initial value, but also long-term value. And update regularly with little extra gifts of capabilities that existing users will appreciate. Think of them like the chocolates on the pillow at the hotel.

Grounded gamification

Games are great, and gamification brings the best part of games (targets, competition, scoring, and trophies) to processes and events that are not traditionally games. But that doesn’t mean that Microsoft Word should give you points for every TPS report that you remember to put a cover memo on.

Gamification works best when it is not forced, when it feels natural. Gamification elements should emerge from the application rather than be pasted on in a “There, I fixed it” manner. For example, if there are actual achievement levels, or if the achievement is believably real.

I was not impressed in late 2011 when Klout awarded me a new achievement for visiting Klout.com three days in a row when I hadn’t even visited once (besides the time I was awarded). Nike+, on the other hand, is a great example of gamification that rises directly from the core value of the service itself.

Time and chance

In your pursuit of virality, remember the ancient wisdom: “time and chance happeneth to them all.” Position yourself to take advantage of viral effects, but don’t short-change the marketing budget!

Image credits: Contagion, Shutterstock, one cake/Shutterstock, ants/Shutterstock, rusted bolt/Shutterstock, milk churn/Shutterstock, game Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Even though Instapaper developer Marco Arment has repeatedly stated he wouldn’t bring his beloved app to Android, that apparently doesn’t rule out pushing the development work to someone else. Today Instapaper finally makes it way to Android smartphones and tablets for $2.99, brought to you by the app development firm Mobelux.

Arment approached the team at Mobelux after working with them to develop the Tumblr Android app.

What’s more interesting is why he decided to finally adopt Android: “I think it was the success of the Kindle Fire and the Nook that tipped my hand,” Arment told the Verge in an interview. “They sold millions of units. I am not a fan of the 7-inch form factor, I mean what is that, a padfone, a phablet? But for me personally, Instapaper is now a tablet app first, and smartphone second.”

For the most part, the app functions just like its iOS counterpart: You can bookmark stories from the Android browser, as well as access other stories you’ve saved to read later. (Check out our extensive hands-on with the Android Instapaper.)

Alongside Instagram and Flipboard, Instapaper was one of the few wildly popular iOS apps that were absent on Android. But now that all three apps have finally hit Google’s platform, it seems like we’ve hit a turning point: as much as developers love iOS, they can no longer ignore Android as a viable market for their apps.

Coming late to Android may have hurt Instapaper’s fanbase on Google’s platform. I’ve heard from many former Instapaper users who moved over to competing bookmarking service Read It Later, which recently rebranded itself as Pocket.

Arment still prefers iOS as a user, he said in the interview, but appreciates certain aspects of Android as a developer — for instance, the ability to make Instapaper appear in the browser’s share menu.

To be fair, both iOS and Android present issues for developers, but since Apple’s platform has been a much better money-maker, it understandably gets more attention from some developers. But with Instapaper’s long-awaited release on Android, I think we’re going to see more developers finally taking Android seriously. And hopefully, it means you can say goodbye to drool-worthy apps being exclusive to iOS.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Oddly, the same could be said of mobile apps.

The best mobile apps share a set of common characteristics: they are elegant, effortless to use, pleasant to look at, and accomplish something needed or wanted. The worst apps face-palm hilariously in a wide variety of ways.

There are some common pitfalls to avoid when designing your own mobile app. Here are the seven deadly sins of mobile design:

One: Kitchen sink

I can fit one … more … feature … in!

You are in love with the power of your app, but no-one else will be if you try to cram too much into it, or too much into your design.

Think of Bump, the app for sharing data between phones easily. At first, the app allowed you to transfer music and app recommendations along with contact information, photos, and other things. Users didn’t know what to think, so the developers stripped functionality out of the app, only enabling the transfer of contact information and photos. And that’s when they took off.

Simple is easy. Simple is understandable. And simple is marketable.

Two: Inconsistency

I think it’s beautiful!

Set a design language and keep to it. Design, of course, is about how it works, not just how it looks. So set standards for how users move from page to page, how you use menus, tabs, or buttons, and other user interface elements. Think about the small user interface details such as what uses a pop-up and what doesn’t.

Stick to the standard look and feel of your chosen platform(s) as much as possible, and ensure that internally at least, you are consistent. That makes learning how to use your app much more intuitive for users and will keep them coming back.

Three: Over designing

What do you mean the screen is full?

Think like Steve Jobs: You’re finished when it’s as simple as it could possibly be. Or like Michelangelo, who sculpted by removing the marble that surrounded his chosen shape.

When designing your app, you should be ruthless: kill extra visual flourishes, meaningless elements, and the shouldn’t-we-have-something-there images. Design is as much about what you don’t include as what you do include, so start paring down your interface.

Four: Speed (the lack thereof)

Why don’t you like my calculator?

Think like Lightning McQueen in the Cars movie. Speed, speed, I am speed.

Your users don’t care that you’re loading data over a barely-3G connection. Or that your outrageously cool animation is suffering from puny mobile CPU syndrome.

Execute the long loading animation, and be careful about large images and backgrounds that have to be loaded and stored. Allow users to cancel operations that are taking too long, and load the minimum of data needed for the next interaction.

Better yet, pre-load information that users might be requesting next.

Five: Verbiage

Now this is good design

There is almost no clearer sign of an immature app that has not been exhaustively edited, re-thought, re-imagined, and tested to destruction that labels, text, and menus that are unnecessarily long and wordy.

If you need such extensively detailed labels and directions, it’s a clue that your app is not as obvious, easy, and straightforward as it ought to be. Re-think. Get second opinions. Ensure you have a bona fide writer on your team who can slice and dice verbiage for breakfast. Then second and third-guess yourself until you know you have it right.

Six: Non-standard interaction

Shaved your fingers lately?

Platforms are platforms in part because they embody a set of characteristics so that users develop familiarity and comfort in the ecosystem: they know what to expect, they get what they expect, and they can use what they get. This has been on of the Mac platforms biggest advantages over the Windows platform: more standard human interface guidelines.

Know your platform. Consider the standard actions that users can be expected to know. And don’t do amazing wonderful things when four fingers are swiped from left to right, or two fingers drag on the diagonal.

Keep it simple, stupid.

Seven: Help-and-FAQ-itis

It’s the un-design design

No, you cannot save a confusing and poorly designed app with a Help feature or FAQs. Look at the best apps you use, the ones you love. Do they have help sections? FAQs? Built in customer support for using the app?

Adding a Help is a white flag in the usability war: you’ve surrendered, you can’t win, and you give up.

And a *free* bonus: Background images

If you want to send a massive signal that your app has been created by amateurs or an app-builder platform, use background images and put text and UI elements over top of them.

Summing up

The best way to avoid making stupid app development mistakes? Download and use a lot of good apps. Notice how they work, and how they make you feel. Then ask: do I feel the same way when I use my app? If not, you’ve got some work to do.

Photo credit: App worlds image courtesy of Shutterstock, app design images from Theresa Neil, iTunes

If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it? And if your app joins the 50 bajillion other apps already on the market, will anyone notice?

I’ve had the privilege of building apps with hundreds of thousands of downloads, but sadly, the default answer is a big, bold no. In fact, a recent study revealed that 60 percent of apps don’t make money. You, however, want to be in the 40 percent. Don’t leave it up to luck, take action.

In a roughly descending order of importance, here are some ways to beat the odds:

Build a great app

I know it’s shocking, but great apps are going to sell better than crappy apps. So make sure you’re working on something great!

That could be a totally new type of app, or it could be a completely re-imagined approach to a common app type. What it cannot be is yet another boring matching-jewels game: there are 5000 of them already.

Having a great app isn’t just about a great idea, it’s also great execution: design, user experience, even details like a great icon. Perhaps shockingly, having a stunning icon is hugely important. It’s often the first thing users see, and they will base their impressions of your professionalism, design, and hipness on that tiny little square of pixels.

Get great reviews

Users are going to decide whether or not to risk the time cost and dollar cost of downloading your app based on the reviews they see. It can be cruel and brutal, but your app’s life is dependent on users who may not see important features, sometimes make stupendously stupid assumptions about what a $0.99 app should offer, and can even in a few cases be malicious.

So do whatever it takes to get good reviews. Test, re-test, and re-re-test. Make sure your app is solid. Send promo codes to friends and family, people who are likely to give you a bit of a break and maybe rate your product just a little bit higher. Make sure everyone in your company, if you work for a company, downloads the app, rates it, and reviews it.

Do what you need to do to get 4+ stars and great comments, because the next two marketing methods are 100 percent dependent on this step.

Build in social

If there’s anything that the explosion of social has taught us, it’s that people like to share. And, that the best way for your company to grow is to crowdsource marketing by giving your passionate users a bigger voice.

If your app is a game, do a leaderboard. Use Game Center on iOS, and equivalent functionality on Android when it arrives. Let people tweet and share, boasting about their high scores.

If it’s a utility, find social equivalents: sharing notes with colleagues, tweeting app activity, publishing accomplishments, highlighting insights.

The best social, of course, is baked right in. Think Draw Something — it has the network effects of a fax machine: one is useless, each one added to the network makes all the others more valuable.

A final note: an app with one star and withering reviews is not going to become successful through social channels. It may very well be highlighted in social networks, but not for the reasons you want, and not with the results you’re looking for.

Pitch, pitch, pitch (and then pitch some more)

Get comfortable with selling. To make your app move, you need to sell yourself, your vision, your angle, and most importantly, your app. You want to get noticed by the app blogs and the top tech blogs, and you need reviews.

To get them, you’re going to need to pitch. It helps when you have a good story (rinse and repeat, see the first tip) but that is not going to be enough. You need to confidently and competently pitch editors, journalists, bloggers, and ordinary people on the shining merits and sheer awesomeness of your wonderful app.

If you can’t get excited about it, why should anyone else?

SEO your app description

Discovery in the crowded app store or Google Play is a function of popularity (which you don’t have on day one) and placement (if you happen to get lucky enough to know the second cousin twice removed of an app store editor, who places you in the featured apps category) and search (yeah, that’s where you sit).

Search on the app store is just like search on the web: more and better data equals higher ranking. So write your description with care. Look at what your competitors are saying … especially those who are ranking well. Craft it with appropriate keyword density for the search terms that you think your potential customers will use. And tweak from time to time to shake it up.

Unfortunately, multivariate testing is not really a viable option here.

Be free, freemium, cheap…

Unless you’re Disney or Zynga, no-one knows you and no-one cares. Taking a risk on your app is just that: a risk. And most people don’t like risks.

So reduce the riskiness by being free or cheap. Use a freemium monetization model to drive initial downloads, if that works for your app. Do a lite version that rocks, but leaves user wanting just a bit more. Give away lots of promo codes initially. Have sales. Try different price points.

If all else fails, advertise

It was Jon Bond, an ad exec, who said that “in the future, marketing will be like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.” Well guess what, sometimes we’re losers and yes, we have to pay for it.

Advertise for downloads on AdMob and other networks, but note that costs per download can be in excess of $1, and just like in the Google AdWords world, there are scammers looking to suck up your cash and leave you with no real users.

Or, cross-promote your app with other apps using services like Playhaven or Applifier so that you and other developers can share users and build audience.

If *really* all else fails, buy users to get in the top app lists

If you are really desperate you are going to enter gray-hat or even black-hat territory, and simply buy downloads so that you rise in the top app lists, from which you hope to generate real customers and real revenues. (Just to be clear, I don’t recommend this … but it does happen.)

To do so, pay a company like GTekna $10,000 or so and let the magic happen. You’ll get on the leaderboard and have a shot at hundreds of thousands of downloads, just from the visibility. Whether you can stay there or not depends on how good your app is, and how well you’ve done all the other steps.

Marketing your app is just as hard, if not harder, as building your app. It’s a long tough slog, and not everyone can do it. Have you successfully marketed your apps? Let us know how in the comments!

Apps image courtesy of ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The main coders working on HP’s Enyo  — the HTML5 application framework first seen in the HP TouchPad — have jumped ship and are headed to Google, the Verge reports.

This puts a huge dent in HP’s plan to open source webOS, which admittedly was weak from the start. HP only announced that it was opening up webOS after it failed to find a suitable buyer. We reported that HP tried to sell its Palm assets for $1.2 billion — the same price it initially paid for them.

Sources tell the Verge that the departing crew wrote “99 percent of the code” for Enyo, and that also includes Matt McNulty, who headed the Enyo team. HP planned to release the first version of Open webOS later this year, but without the Enyo folks I can’t really see that happening. (In a statement to the Verge, HP said everything was on schedule.)

HP announced earlier this week that it’s laying off 27,000 employees — which likely gave the Enyo crew the impetus to move on.

The news doesn’t mean that we’ll start seeing great webOS design influences and features in Android. The Enyo team was instead focused on making it easier for developers to create apps for the platform. It’s still unclear where they’ll end up at Google, but it will likely be either the Android team (though Android apps are built in Java, not HTML5) or Google Chrome (which could use a robust HTMl5 app framework).